Middle East|Loss of Shelter and Electricity Worsens a Crisis for Fleeing Gazans

Supported by

Loss of Shelter and Electricity Worsens a Crisis for Fleeing Gazans

Image

Palestinian firefighters responded Tuesday to a blast at Gaza’s main power plant. The attack cut the electricity needed to pump water and sewage systems.CreditCreditWissam Nassar for The New York Times

GAZA CITY — When artillery shattered their home near the Israeli border, Ibrahim Hillis, a grandfather, rushed his extended family to the city to seek shelter, but the schools were full and relatives’ houses were already packed with others displaced by the war.

So home became a patch of thin grass around a tree trunk behind this city’s central hospital, where his family rigged up sheets to block the sun. Scores of other families had done the same, food and water were scarce, and ambulances bearing the victims of new attacks screamed in day and night.

“We are living in the dirt,” said Mr. Hillis, 73. “There is no work, no money, no medical treatment, and everything is decided by those fighting, so what can we, the people, do about it?”

Three weeks of war between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza have pushed the territory to the brink of humanitarian disaster. Israel’s military on Tuesday broadened its offensive, bombing 150 sites, and one strike set ablaze the territory’s only power plant, filling the sky with smoke and cutting the electricity needed to pump water and sewage systems as well.

As the Palestinian death toll has risen to more than 1,220, including about 300 children, 22 medical facilities have been damaged and 215,000 people have fled their homes.

The longer the war lasts, the worse it gets.

International efforts to secure even short-term cease-fires have so far failed, and aid groups say indiscriminate battle tactics on both sides have endangered civilians.

“The Israelis and Hamas this time have crossed the Rubicon,” said Stuart Willcuts, the director of Mercy Corps for the West Bank and Gaza. “There is some kind of psychological marker that they have crossed, and they are not going to quit until we don’t know when.”

Even before the war, Gaza’s humanitarian situation was precarious. An Israeli-Egyptian blockade meant to weaken Hamas had decimated the economy, and half the population depended on food aid.

More than a quarter of Gaza’s arable land was considered a buffer zone and was unusableby Palestinians before the war, according to the United Nations. Now, 44 percent of the territory is a no-go zone.

This has increased the pressure on Gaza City, originally home to about a third of Gaza’s 1.7 million Palestinians, but now holding many more who have fled the front lines.

In the stretches of quiet between the recent wars, Gaza City has striven to be like cities elsewhere, but even its finer areas bear scars. Shattered windows mar beachfront hotels, and Israeli airstrikes have collapsed parts of downtown towers.

“Our whole lives have been war,” said Sobhi Salim, 59, sitting with his family in the park of the Unknown Soldier during a lull this week. They had fled the eastern neighborhood of Shejaiya and returned to find their home destroyed, he said, making it unclear where they would go after the war. Three of his nephews had died fleeing the neighborhood, he said, and another had been killed fighting for Hamas.

Image

Mourners at the funeral of an Israeli soldier killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip took cover on Tuesday during a Palestinian attack.CreditGil Cohen Magen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As he spoke, a man with a plastic toy car outfitted with speakers and lights charged small change to give children rides. A fountain that children often dived in for respite from the heat had stopped working and now held a foot of dirty, green water.

“The violence will never bring a solution if there is not a political agreement,” he said. “They all say, ‘We’ll bring freedom with the rifle,’ but it’s all empty talk.”

Even when the two sides are not at war, Israel has a complicated relationship with Gaza. It insists it has not occupied the territory since withdrawing its troops and settlers in 2005. But it controls Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, cellphone frequencies and population registry.

A baby born in Gaza gets an identification number only after approval by Israel.

“It’s a tool of control over people’s lives,” said Sari Bashi, of Gisha, an Israeli advocacy group focused on Gaza. “It’s one of the elements of occupation that did not end in 2005.”

The United Nations and the United States government consider Gaza occupied, though Israel does not.

Throughout the war, Israel has continued to allow food and electricity into Gaza, complicating Palestinian claims that they are besieged.

Ironically, Tuesday’s strike on the Gaza power station will make the territory even more dependent on Israel.

Image

Palestinians displaced from their homes received bread on Tuesday in the northern Gaza Strip.CreditMarco Longari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Today there is no electricity in Gaza,” said Jamal Dardasawi of Gaza’s power company.

The plant would take months to fix, he said, and eight of the 10 lines that bring electricity to Gaza from Israel have been damaged by the war, leaving only a trickle coming in from there and from Egypt.

Mr. Dardasawi blamed Israel for the strike, but Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said Israel had not identified the source of the attack.

“I don’t have a clear picture of what happened there,” he said.

Israel has said the war is necessary to stop rocket fire by Gaza militants on its communities and to destroy a network of tunnels they have used to sneak fighters into Israel to kidnap soldiers. It blames Hamas for the vast destruction and the high civilian death toll, saying the militants fight from residential areas.

But such reasoning angers Gazans, who believe “the resistance” has a right to fight back against a stronger power and say that Hamas’s battle tactics do not justify razing civilian homes.

“Look at where they have forced us to live,” said Mr. Hillis’s wife, Insaf, in the family’s tent behind the hospital. “Every family here has a son or a father or a brother who has been killed, and all of their children will grow up wanting revenge.”

For many people in Gaza, it is the sounds of Israel’s military that fill their days: the ever-present whine of the drones that monitor movements and fire missiles, the deep thump of artillery fired by warships or troops, and the screech of fighter jets that dot the sky with flares and drop bombs that level homes.

There are also phone calls, in Arabic with heavy Hebrew accents, threatening Hamas members, “We will hunt you down no matter where you are!”

Leaflets dropped over the city this week bore a map of Gaza dotted with graves.

“Do you know where the bodies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad elements are?” they read. The back bore a list of dead fighters with a question: “Whose name do you think will be in the next leaflet?”

During the war, Gazans have heard little from Hamas, other than its television or radio stations, which splice jihadi music with news about the “Zionist enemy” and often predict victory “in the next few days.”

As the war continues, most Gazans are just struggling for a safe place to sleep.

About 400 people, all Muslims, have crowded into the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, where Archbishop Alexios has four rules: “Be quiet, be clean, no problems and no weapons.”

The displaced sleep in offices and meeting halls and string their laundry across the courtyard. When it is too dangerous to walk to the mosque, they lay out rugs and pray in the church.

Alaa Sukkar said his family had fled to Gaza City with no place to go and stumbled upon the church, where they had stayed since.

A fighter jet screamed overhead as he spoke, and he blamed Israel for the war and said Hamas had to fire rockets to keep Israel out of Gaza.

But when asked whether the rockets actually did that, he reconsidered.

“The rockets don’t protect us, and the Jews’ tanks and jets don’t protect them,” he said. “The only thing that could protect us would be peace between us.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Loss of Shelter and Electricity Worsens a Crisis for Fleeing Gazans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe